Zygmunt Borawski & Jan Przedpełski: Logan, I think we would like to start with the beginnings. Would you describe your professional journey from the United States to Switzerland? When did you decide to move here? What motivated this decision? And why did you choose to stay? What do you know or imagine about Switzerland before you arrived here?

Logan Amont: I did my bachelor’s degree in the United States. After my first year, I took part in a workshop at Arcosanti, Arizona, where I met many students from India and Japan. Arcosanti had an informal sister-city relationship with Auroville in India – an experimental community with a focus on alternative building techniques.

While most of my colleagues went on to do corporate internships, I decided to go to Auroville instead. There in India, a French woman in the same studio introduced me to the work of certain contemporary Swiss architects.

Later, while I was working in Tokyo, a student from the Accademia di architettura di Mendrisio had sent the school yearbook to the office. I was shocked by the models. One of the architects there – Japanese, someone who actually also lives in Basel now – was aware of the school and said: You can go study there, even without speaking fluent Italian.

That was when the idea of doing my master’s degree in Switzerland became a clear possibility to pursue. So I applied, took Italian language courses and enrolled in the autumn semester of 2007.

After one semester and a year of working, I left Switzerland because at that time we were told that if both partners were non-EU citizens (my wife is Japanese), your spouse couldn’t live with you. So we moved to Japan and India for some years.

During this period, I was often traveling in Europe, and on one occasion I met Quintus Miller, who asked me whether I would like to teach as an assistant with him in Mendrisio. I said sure, but pointed out that I didn’t have a master’s degree. He replied: Then come back and finish it. That’s how I ended up coming back then.

And why do I stay? As an American, without family connections, the US doesn’t feel easy to navigate professionally. Here, I know and respect many people who practice – we have a shared dialogue – people approximately understand what you’re trying to do. The architectural culture in the US feels very polarised: either extremely theoretical and pretentious, or depressingly pragmatic, often with very little ambition.

ZB & JP: Where exactly did you do your bachelor’s degree in the US?

LA: In Cincinnati.

ZB & JP: And you did your master's in Mendrisio, but before you also completed one year towards an additional bachelor’s degree in Mendrisio?

LA: Yes, that was required in my case with the US degree.

ZB & JP: The way your practice works seems interesting. On the one hand, you are clearly based in Switzerland, and most of your work and professional activities are connected to Switzerland. On the other hand, your practice is not limited to one national context. You built a pavilion in Belgium, you are involved in projects in Japan, Sardinia, Czechia, and also in Poland.

You seem to be simultaneously an insider and an outsider – partly here, partly elsewhere. We were wondering how this position shapes your practice. There is this well-known idea of thinking globally and acting locally – do you feel that this applies to the way you work?

How do you position yourself within this sense of locality, particularly in Switzerland? Do you find yourself doing what could be called Swiss architecture outside Switzerland, and non-Swiss architecture within Switzerland? Or is that distinction irrelevant for you?

What really interests us is how this in-between position affects your thinking and your work. Does it consciously shape your decisions, or is it something that operates more implicitly? I don’t mean in the sense of deliberately exporting a model – like saying, now I will apply Swiss architecture in Czechia because it has a higher chance of success – but rather in how your position translates, if at all, into practice.

LA: It’s not something I consciously instrumentalise, but I think it probably does have an impact – otherwise we might not have won some of the competitions we did. We cannot pretend we are not influenced by our surroundings. In the kindergarten project in Vimperk, Czechia, for instance, I was familiar with the work of one of the jury members, and I was aware that he is curious about what is happening internationally. So that position – being slightly external, but still respectful of the context there – may have played a role in the outcome.

With the lookout tower in Prague, which we did together with Jonas Løland, it was different. There, I think they were explicitly looking for something strange, something unexpected, because the park already had a lot of bizarre elements in it. In Czech culture, the typology of a lookout tower seems very much tied to the image of a church bell tower, more or less. We proposed something else. In that case, difference itself became a value.

But that only works under very specific conditions. For something like an office building or a city hall, appearing as the other or searching for tension would most likely not be seen as a quality. I participated in quite a few other competitions in Czechia for more conservative programs, and they were not successful. So it’s likely brief- and context-dependent.

ZB & JP: What would you describe as the most important influences on your work?

LA: I wouldn’t say there are such specific, clear influences, or there are perhaps just too many to easily list off. But to try, the way I contemplate architecture comes from relating to all I have been exposed to – walking around, education, traveling, reading, David Lynch’s work, certain ideas around heightened perception as articulated by Aldous Huxley… All of this forms what I carry with me. Living in Japan and India for around five years was important, as are experiences from my childhood growing up at a forest edge near Lake Erie.

ZB & JP: Do you change your scope depending on the country you work in, or do you think more in terms of typology? How do you adjust to the context of a place?

LA: I don’t really think about it in national terms. For me, it’s more about a spectrum between rural and urban conditions. A kindergarten in the countryside of Czechia is not fundamentally different, in my mind, from one in a comparable village in Switzerland.

Of course, I’m aware that in some contexts you might be able to get away with more than in others. But you can usually read that from the situation itself – by looking at the contemporary vernacular of a place and at what the current, local architectural scene is engaging with. Czech architecture has a certain quirkiness – which I enjoy – and when you observe what contemporary architects are producing there, you get the sense that you might be able to go a bit further than you would in Switzerland.

At the same time, what we did in Czechia is something I would like to do in Switzerland, but the scene has become rather conservative over the last ten years. I imagine it would be difficult to win here with something like this project today.

ZB & JP: What do you mean by conservative architecture?

LA: Not regarding what wins open competitions in cities and receives the most attention, but rather what gets built in rural areas through direct mandates and selective competitions. I sometimes feel this standard way of building is partly a consequence of certain architectural ideas becoming conventions over time. In the last half of the 20th century, there was certainly value in broadening the discussion beyond strict functionalism and in paying greater attention to the normal existing built environment. But when these concerns become established ways of working, they also lose a critical force, and the resulting architecture can become comfortable rather than questioning. Of course, the best architects working within these traditions went beyond this and created something more nuanced that could engage with contemporary society.

ZB: While thinking about what we tentatively call a new Swiss wave – a term we chose deliberately, perhaps even provocatively – we tried to name a shift that we sense in Swiss architecture today compared to the moment when we were graduating from Mendrisio together, around 2014.

What we observe is, for instance, the enormous impact of timber construction, particularly in school buildings. Many competitions for schools – which are often the main entry point for young practices in Switzerland – are now being won by timber-based projects. At the same time, we see a move toward a neo–high-tech aesthetic and increasingly lightweight facade tectonics, replacing the sense of mass that once strongly characterised Swiss architecture.

This shift seems closely connected to a more technical and environmental approach to design that; controls solar gain; reduces energy consumption and both collects and stores water and energy. As a result, the facade often becomes an intricate control surface – complex, refined, and sometimes even fetishised in its lightness. In parallel, we also observe a growing aesthetic of reuse, reclaim, assemblage, and patchwork.

Do you recognise yourself within this notion of a new Swiss wave? Do you feel close to these ways of thinking, designing, and building? And do you believe that there is something that fundamentally distinguishes this generation – or constellation of practices – from the earlier ones?

LA: I understand what you’re saying, and I actually have mixed feelings about this as well. In a way, like you, I came to Switzerland because I was interested in a direction of thinking about architecture which was present at that time. It is true that that focus has shifted. What you are describing, though, I would associate mainly with a younger, ambitious generation – not with the general production of the country.

Of course, I recognise this reality. If a competition explicitly calls for reuse, then you have to engage with it, and I am happy to do so. Otherwise, you’d be an idiot to come in and say, We want to cast two layers of concrete everywhere. The same goes for school buildings with hybrid timber structures. I’m a realist – I work within these conditions, finding solutions respecting them.

Research by architects working intensively on these issues could result in quality buildings. At times, it feels market-driven and ephemeral – another wave to swim along with – but within it is nonetheless a real contribution.

ZB & JP: The issue is that I feel all of it has become a fashion, almost a fetish. It’s been overwhelming to see how many very similar projects keep winning competitions. There is an aesthetic emerging in which producing attractive technical drawings seems more important than thinking about space – than actually designing space.

This general wave of technicality has left very little room for talking about space. Discussions about storing energy, managing resources, optimising performance have become more important than discussions about spatial experience. And that worries us.

That’s why I was curious about your position – how you see this moment, and how you position yourself within it. Because when we look at your work, we also see a certain distance from both the conservative offices and these new tendencies.

LA: I was recently asked to give a presentation to students in Bergen about a reuse competition in Basel. We didn’t win – but proceeded to the third of four rounds. In that presentation, I somewhat cautioned the students: these themes – reuse, sustainability, technical innovation – are absolutely worth investigating. But the danger is that they become a distraction from the fundamentals of architecture.

This reminds me of a book written in the 1980s – For an Architecture of Reality, a critique directed mostly against American postmodernism. The author, Michael Benedikt, a professor from Texas, argued that architects were losing sight of what architecture can do, because they had become obsessed with irony, references, and formal games. Even when he later wrote about buildings he found acceptable within the period, his core concern remained the same: that architecture risks the loss of its basic capacities – space, structure, use – how buildings stand up to us – when it becomes overly absorbed in trends, techniques, or intellectual fashions.

In that sense, I see a parallel today. Being coerced into working with timber, reuse, or environmental intelligence does not create any problem in itself. The issue is when these topics become ends in themselves – when architecture turns into a demonstration of virtuosity rather than a careful construction of space. I feel these movements can shift attention away from other qualities which are unique to architecture…

ZB: Could you clarify?

I think architecture has the capacity to create a heightened awareness of living – of being alive – of perceiving. Sometimes that should feel like a slap in the face, to wake you up, other times like comfort, and everything in between, as in a good relationship.

Architecture can make you aware of your own physicality, and of your intellectual engagement with space and the world. Of course, this can also happen outside of architecture – in vernacular buildings, or even by accident in developer-driven projects. It does happen – and we should keep our eyes open for it everywhere.

ZB & JP: When did you become aware of this? Was there a moment when you realised you actually know what you are doing?

LA: I often have doubts when starting something. I don’t think that ever fully goes away. The friction can lead to looking at things in unexpected ways. Somewhere within my being, I carry an image of a life I would like to make visible in the world, even when the path toward it is unclear. Through discussion with collaborators and by taking in their input, we slowly move toward creating something that begins to approach that direction.

More concretely, teaching as an assistant for many years and going through projects with students helped me a great deal. It made me quicker, more decisive, and better able to develop projects in line with an underlying intent. As a student, everything feels cloudy – there’s a lot of self-questioning, a lot of internal psychology involved. As an assistant, you’re more in a position of observing. And that distance is something you can later bring back into your own practice.

ZB & JP: Would you like to teach yourself?

LA: Eventually, yes. For now, I’m focused on building.

ZB & JP: How has living in Switzerland influenced your way of thinking? Not only professionally, but also personally.

LA: What I appreciate enormously about Switzerland is that people give you space and respect to follow your interests and research. When you’ve lived in a place where that is not always the case, this becomes a real value. Here, I can concentrate on what I need to do, on what I want to do. No one thinks I’m crazy because I spend my days reading books or working quietly.

ZB: I want to go back, one last time, to your architecture. I think it is important for our readers to have a bit of a context when it comes to your work. What I really appreciate about it is that it seems deeply rooted in a European tradition of organic architecture, but there are traces of strong Scandinavian influence.

Finally, when you lived in Japan you worked as Gardener. How did that experience impact your formation and what lessons – or perhaps better; attitudes, do you have towards landscape and the ground on which a building stands?

LA: Looking closely at Japanese gardens, and later at landscapes more generally, certainly had a strong influence on how I perceive space, opening up the possibility of non-straightforward orders and dynamic balances. I would say that landscape thinking has shaped my way of designing architecture, in that every mass we decide to place in space carries the potential to affect experience in multiple, sometimes indirect, ways.